Saturday, 7 October 2017

The elevated estrogen levels of Star Trek: Discovery

An unnatural number of women types, yesterday.
You ever enter a conversation and you get to a stage where you're desperately praying “don't disappoint me, don't disappoint me, don't disappoint me”? Well, I keep having that when Star Trek: Discovery comes up. I swear, 90% of the conversations I have about this show with any guy ends up with “Aren't there are a lot of women in it, though?”

No. No no no no no.

There's five. There's Michael Burnham herself, Captain Phillipa Georgiou, Commander Landry, Cadet Tilly and the ginger flight controller whose name escapes me at the moment. So far only four out of this list have appeared in a single episode together. That's not a lot. Four women in any given episode (so far, in the UK we have episodes one to three). That's not actually a lot, especially considering one of them has so few lines I can't remember her name.

I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's Men-At-Arms where one of the central jokes is that the Watch is being required to recruit “minorities” and they recruit a troll, a dwarf and a werewolf except no one says that Angua is a werewolf until she finally transforms so for more than hundred pages you think the minorities are a troll, a dwarf and a woman and laugh at these male characters who are so uncomfortable about (you think) having a woman in their space.

And then you get to a point in real life where people continuously act like having four women sharing screentime in a given episode of Star Trek is somehow an unnaturally inflated figure.

Spot on, Sir Terry, spot on. 

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